I have come to the conclusion that anyone who thinks about Kafka for long enough inevitably develops a few singular, unassimilable and slightly silly convictions. (The graph may be parabolic, with the highest incidence of convictions – and the legal resonance is invited – found among those who have spent the most time thinking and those who have spent next to no time thinking.) My own such amateur conviction is that the life of Franz Kafka reads like a truly great comedy. I mean this (of course) in large part because of the tragedies in and around his life, and I mean it in the tradition of comedies like the final episode of Richard Curtis and Rowan Atkinson’s Blackadder, which, after episode upon episode of darlings and foilings and cross-dressings, ends in 1917 with our not exactly heroes climbing out of their trench and running towards the enemy lines.

Friends, family, and co-workers reminisce before the camera in the biographic documentary I Don't Know Jack [~1h30m], about the life and career and character of Jack Nance, best known for playing Henry Spencer in Eraserhead and Pete Martell in Twin Peaks.
posted by hippybear
on Nov 7, 2014 -
4 comments

...if it felt like an author had already come into your life, already seen some aspect of your experience then it would be natural to want to extend this intimacy into conversation.
The impulse to contact a confessional writer – whose writing has already revealed something private – is something else. Perhaps it is still a desire to translate one kind of intimacy into another, but the terms are different. With confessional writing, the disclosure has already happened – now the reader wants to confess something back, make a reciprocal exchange. So whenever people talk about confessional writing as navel-gazing or self-involved, I think about those voices, and their offerings.

Salinger Betrayed: despite their show-stopping if unattributed revelation of a publication schedule and descriptions for the author's posthumous works, Shane Salerno's tabloid-style documentary film (now recut), and the accompanying biography co-written by David Shields, have been very poorly received. [more inside]
posted by RogerB
on Oct 21, 2013 -
37 comments

"During his days as Harvard’s influential president, Dr. Charles W. Eliot made a frequent assertion: If you were to spend just 15 minutes a day reading the right books, a quantity that could fit on a five-foot shelf, you could give yourself a proper liberal education. Publisher P. F. Collier and Son loved the idea and asked Eliot to compile and edit the right collection of works. The result: a 51-volume series of classic works from world literature published in 1909 called Dr. Eliot’s Five Foot Shelf, which would later be called The Harvard Classics." (Via)[more inside]
posted by zarq
on Jul 11, 2013 -
89 comments

“With a $100,000-plus salary from newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst, beginning in 1929, followed by endorsement deals, speaking engagements, and earnings from his best-selling books, radio shows, movies, and museums, he was earning well over half a million dollars a year during the height of the Depression. By 1936, a newspaper poll found, Ripley was more popular than James Cagney, President Roosevelt, Jack Dempsey, and even Lindbergh.” – Vanity Fair features an excerpt adapted from Neal Thompson’s new book, A Curious Man: The Strange and Brilliant Life of Robert “Believe It or Not!” Ripley.[more inside]
posted by AlonzoMosleyFBI
on Jun 11, 2013 -
7 comments

"Outcasts are my kind, they try harder. From strip joints to Burlesque theaters, I went on a quest and met the 'Legends', these dominating characters of the quintessential American art of strip tease. Hours of confidence on tapes, intimate photo sessions, they peel off and reveal the hidden layers of their life with throaty emotion. Their memories reflecting the memories of the land. Vietnam vets and bikers are their loyal patrons..." The Living Art Of Risqué, a photo essay from Marie Baronnet, features portraits of former strippers aged 60 to 95, accompanied by short bio-vignettes in their own words. [NSFW; nudity][more inside]
posted by taz
on Jan 10, 2013 -
4 comments

Journalism and Revolution is a review from Dissent Magazine about the biography of Ryszard Kapuściński.
This was Neal Ascherson in LRB.
Both of which are very different from Jack Shafer´s take down obituary piece in Slate.
posted by adamvasco
on Jan 9, 2013 -
13 comments

Tweedland has some interesting stories and characters. Here's two to get you started:

Robert de Montesquiou - "Tall, black-haired, rouged, Kaiser-moustached, he cackled and screamed in weird attitudes, giggling in high soprano, hiding his little black teeth behind an exquisitely gloved hand – the poseur absolute. He was said to have slept with Sarah Bernhardt and vomited for a week afterwards."

Lord Berners - "As a child, having heard that if you throw a dog into water it will learn how to swim, he threw his mother's canine companion out of the window on the grounds that if one applies the same logic it should learn how to fly. (The dog was unharmed, and he was "thrashed" by his mother.)"

Perhaps to compensate for his not-so imposing physique, lack of good looks, and plebeian background, Gabriele D’Annunzio (1863-1938) embraced excess in everything he did. And he did many things: novelist, playwright, poet, aviator and sailor, a genuine war hero, a narcissist, a drug addict, a gifted rabble-rouser, debt-evader, and a noted womanizer.
posted by Chrysostom
on Oct 4, 2012 -
7 comments

Johnny Cash once called 1968 the happiest year of his life. It was the year his masterpiece At Folsom Prison came out, the year he was named the Country Music Association’s Entertainer of the Year, and the year he married the love of his life, June Carter. So it was a fortunate time for a young filmmaker named Robert Elfstrom to meet up with Cash for the making of a documentary. Elfstrom traveled with Cash for several months in late 1968 and early 1969. The resulting film, Johnny Cash: The Man, His World, His Music, is a revealing look at Cash, his creative process and his ties to family. [via]
posted by netbros
on Sep 28, 2012 -
14 comments

A perceptive audio interview with biographer David Maraniss on the life of Barack Obama, including detailed research on his friends and relatives.
Pulitzer-prize winning biographer and associate editor of the Washington Post David Maraniss ...collected so much detailed information about the life of Barack Obama and his forbears that when he submitted his introduction and chapter titles to the White House to request an interview, the President himself was intrigued and surprised.
posted by weapons-grade pandemonium
on Jun 29, 2012 -
19 comments

Former Black Panther patches together purpose in Africa exile. 'Most of O'Neal's big dreams have faded over the years, or come to feel silly. Like beating the 42-year-old federal gun charges that caused him to flee the United States. Like the global socialist revolution that he was supposed to help lead. Like returning home to the streets of his Midwestern childhood. Like winning citizenship in his adopted African country, and the prize that's eluded him on two continents: the feeling of belonging somewhere.' [more inside]
posted by VikingSword
on Jan 28, 2012 -
11 comments

A Portrait in Postcards. Twenty years after her death, Angela Carter's literary executor and friend, Susannah Clapp, remembers Carter through the cards she sent, "These cards make a paper trail, a zigzag path through the 80s. They are casually dispatched – some messages are barely more than a signature – but are often the more telling for that: they catch Angela on the wing, shooting her mouth off. She would have hated the idea of a soundbite, but she had a gift for a capsule phrase, for a story in a word. " The postcard gallery.
posted by gladly
on Jan 23, 2012 -
4 comments

One of the more famous suppressed films of recent years isSuperstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, an early work by writer/director Todd Haynes (Safe, Velvet Goldmine, Far from Heaven). Filmed in 1987, the short film -- which relates the rise and fall of Karen Carpenter with a cast of Barbie dolls -- barely got a year's worth of festival time in 1989 before the twin iron boots of A&M Records and Richard Carpenter came down on Haynes.*[more inside]
posted by Trurl
on Dec 31, 2011 -
29 comments

"He and Lewin must have had a magical life together out in the country. When Parrish was 90 years old and Lewin was 71, Parrish's wife finally died, leaving him free to marry Lewin. However, he declined so she packed her bags, left the estate and went back to her village where she married someone else."

The Witness to War project is not about the set piece movements of armies, the military strategies of generals, nor the geopolitical nuances that led to war. Instead, it is about the 'foxhole' view of combat as seen by the soldiers who experienced it.
posted by Horselover Phattie
on May 31, 2011 -
4 comments

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